John Paul II Diminishes the saintly exchange rate

The Australian dollar is finally in reasonably sharp decline.  It is, however, not the only devalued currency in the world.  The value of sainthood has taken an absolute battering with it current worth being flushed down the toilet.

Two living Popes, Benedict XVI and Francis, are collaborating to shift their immediate past president, JP2, up the canonisation ladder.  John Paul II has now passed the biggest hurdle for a non martyr, beatification on the basis of a couple of miracles.  He is a dead set cert for the big ST as a pro nominal. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-05/pope-francis-says-brotherhood-without-god-destined-to-fail.html

Canonisation has in the past been a glacial and deliberate process.  It once took decades of slow movement through the 4 stages of Servant of God, Veneration, Beatification and Canonisation. 

The big change to the process came in 1983 when the Devils’ Advocate, the Promotor Fidei was abolished.  This office would argue against canonisation.  After that filtering system was gone, then canonisation picked up.

The quickest way to sainthood is martyrdom.  For those who us who don’t crave the opportunity to die for the faith, the other way up is to cause a couple of miracles.  Once again, the rules, once tough, are now easy peasy.  A miracle now includes an unexpected medical recovery from an untreatable disease after the invalid has prayed for assistance to the candidate for sainthood.  So if someone prayed to me for recuperation and they spontaneously recuperated, I would have one miracle under my belt in my quest for sainthood! Lucky me!

This is a photo of me being blessed by John Paul II in 1985!  A long and touching relationship.

This photo, taken by the Vatican staff, shows me in the red jacket and rat tail haircut and my wife next to me with the camera poised to take the snap above.  I think that you can just discern her smile under the camera.

The ridiculousness of this test is obvious. Many devout people are going to be praying to the Pope of the day to save them from their illnesses.  The more ill they are the more prayerful they are likely to be.  And of course, medical science has yet to achieve perfection and so some spontaneous “medical miracles” are beyond understanding.  Take this example of a window washer surviving a 47 story fall.  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/nyregion/03cnd-fall.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&hp&   There are heaps of the unexplained recoveries. Cancers go into remission.  Accident victims resume breathing. Coma victims suddenly sit up in bed.  All of these are mysteries but are they miracles??

Faith always prospers with the unexplained.  But to attribute unexpected survival not to even to God but to some person named in a prayer is a stretch of the imagination.  The person so named didn’t solicit the prayer, needn’t know about the prayer or even have claimed that they made the prayed for outcome happen.  All that the candidate for sainthood needs is to be named. 

For a Pope, this is a ridiculously easy test.  Popes probably get named in the prayers of millions every day. It would be amazing if a Pope couldn’t rack up gazillions of examples where people who prayed to him and then spontaneously recover from some real or imagined fatal illness.

A quick perusal of the list of saints by pontificate indicates an explosion in the numbers in recent years.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_canonizations#Modern_canonization.  The popes used to canonise a couple throughout their whole pontificate.  Then too the Saints were more often than not, dead for a few centuries or so.  Now we are less patient.  John Paul II went on an orgy of canonisation.  If only he spent as much energy on sexual abuse scandals, the Vatican financial scandals, the women and gay ordination issues and etc.  The man loved a party and canonised accordingly. 

There seems to be a not so hidden agenda.  As secularisation and the Vatican’s own greed and incompetence threatened the faith, they embarked on a canonisation campaign to change the narrative around the place.  Who needs talk about abuse victim suicides or financial scandals when we have a canonisation party to look forward to?  It is myopic distraction from the elephants in the room.  It is the most obvious strategic response to institutional attack.

Thus the saintly currency is utterly debased. Could anything be more debasing that giving a gong to Pope John Paul II who opposed contraception even in the face of the AIDS crisis?  Even Jesuit Professor Jose Maria Castillo and Italian theologian Giovanni Franzoni have their reservations.  Pope JP2 should be judged harshly by history and not beatified.

Admittedly the Papacy is not alone.  The Brits are debasing knighthood by giving one to a man who won a bike race in France and another is bound to get it for winning Wimbledon when these sports stars also earn millions as compensation for their unique talents.  Is this the monarchy, another institution under pressure, leveraging off celebratory to gain popular support?

Non Catholics and atheists must look at this canonisation development bemused.  I think it indicates the place in Rome is rotten to the core.

What is your view?

Should JP2 get a gong?

Is the test of miracles are joke or a farce (the choices are narrow deliberately)?

Is the explosion in the numbers of saints a response by the Vatican or just merely a symptom of the modern impatience, modern addiction to celebrity or a modern response to problems?  Is it all three?  If it is all three, would you care to make a weighting on the most important???

Over to you guys.